Field
This disclosure is generally related to a content centric network (CCN). More specifically, this disclosure is related to replicating nameless Content Objects across various content-hosting services.
Related Art
The proliferation of the Internet and e-commerce continues to fuel revolutionary changes in the network industry. Today, a significant number of information exchanges, from online movie streaming to daily news delivery, retail sales, and instant messaging, are conducted online. An increasing number of
Internet applications are also becoming mobile. However, the current Internet operates on a largely location-based addressing scheme. The most ubiquitous protocol, the Internet Protocol (IP), is based on location-based address. That is, a consumer of content can only receive the content by explicitly requesting the content from an address (e.g., IP address) closely associated with a physical object or location. A request that has a URL with an IP address for a specific organization causes the request to go to that organization's servers and not to those of another organization.
Recently, content centric networking (CCN) architectures have been proposed in the industry. CCN brings a new approach to content transport. Instead of having network traffic viewed at the application level as end-to-end connections over which content travels, content is requested or returned based on its unique name, and the network is responsible for routing content from the provider to the consumer.
With content centric networks, an Interest message includes a name for a Content Object, and a client can disseminate the Interest over CCN to obtain the Content Object from any CCN node that hosts the Content Object. The Interest is forwarded toward a CCN node that advertises at least a prefix of the Interest's name. If this CCN node can provide the Content Object, this node can return the Content Object (along the Interest's reverse path) to satisfy the Interest.
Publishers oftentimes want to replicate their content across various host servers. Unfortunately, doing so in CCN requires these host servers to advertise the content's name or name prefix so that CCN routers can know how to forward Interests for this content toward the third-party servers. If a host server stores Content Objects for a large number of publishers, the host server's neighboring nodes may need to update their forwarding tables to include entries for each name prefix associated with the Content Objects stored by the host server. This places a significant burden across CCN routers. To make matter worse, if CCN routers do not implement a large enough forwarding table, it is possible that these CCN routers may not be able to forward Interests to a host server for all Content Objects available from the host server.